Did FTX Play a Role in the Luna/UST Depeg and Crash?

The question of whether FTX was involved in the Luna/UST depeg and crash in May 2022 is a complex one, with no definitive proof but plenty of speculation

The question of whether FTX was involved in the Luna/UST depeg and crash in May 2022 is a complex one. There’s no definitive proof yet, but there’s plenty of speculation and some circumstantial evidence.

Here’s what happened: The Terra ecosystem, with its algorithmic stablecoin UST and native token LUNA, collapsed spectacularly as UST lost its $1 peg, kicking off a death spiral that wiped out around $40 billion in market value. This started around May 7, 2022, when massive sell-offs of UST—over $2 billion unstaked from the Anchor Protocol—were seen, kicking off panic. LUNA's price went from $80 to fractions of a cent as the system's mint-and-burn mechanism couldn't handle the pressure.

Now, where does FTX come in? After FTX’s own collapse in November 2022, U.S. prosecutors are reportedly looking into whether Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), FTX’s founder, and his hedge fund Alameda Research might have played a role in Terra’s downfall. The theory is they could have manipulated markets to profit from the crash—perhaps by shorting LUNA or setting up trades to destabilize UST.

Some on-chain whispers—like crypto analysts on X, previously Twitter, claim FTX and Alameda pulled massive amounts of UST from liquidity pools (e.g., $200 million each with Celsius at a vulnerable moment). This could have sped up the depeg. Do Kwon, Terra's founder, also implicated Alameda in February 2021 with the sale of 500 million UST to drain Curve pools and later, in May, shorting Bitcoin to weaken Luna Foundation Guard's reserves.

But here’s the catch: there’s no smoking gun yet. These were early-stage reports in late 2022, and no final findings have directly named FTX as the orchestrator.

Also, according to blockchain analytics like Nansen's May 2022 report, the depeg wasn't a single-player attack but a cascade of events—huge swaps on-chain (like 85 million UST for USDC on May 7) and low liquidity on major centralized exchanges like Binance and FTX contributed.

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